White balance selector turns cursor to zoom

I have the same issue with not just the white balance selector, but also the selectors for Point Color; occasionally Color Mixer; and rarely the Curve selector. Sometimes it will show the Zoom tool as @nthutton says. For me, often it will show the selector with the preview stuck on some random selection of pixels in the current image (or even pixels from a different image I've been working on, if the tool originally got stuck back on that image). It's a mix of issues, but all clearly related. I can't figure out specifically when it'll happen, but, it's particularly quite frequent on white balance and point color, and frequent enough on color mixer that it's overall really problematic. Even quitting Lightroom and reopening doesn't reliably fix.

If the cursor turns into the Zoom tool, it will just zoom when I click on the image, making the selector useless. If it just gets a stuck pixel preview, it will at least correctly handle when I click on the image—i.e. it'll choose the point color/white balance based on where I click on the image, not based on the wonky preview, but I can't see with much detail what pixel it's actually working off of.

I have two screen recordings demonstrating this, and apparent inconsistencies (making it harder to pinpoint). Video embed is acting a bit wonky for me, so linking directly to Vimeo.

1) This one is after having Lightroom open for a while and previously working on other images. This example is an HEIC that is synced, available offline as a full HEIC/original file, and otherwise unedited. Tests with edited images, including other formats (DNGs) and images in HDR editing mode do not behave differently. (All available offline, full originals.)

You can see in this particular example that that:

- Curve point selector works fine.

- White balance selector is stuck on pixels from another image I'd been working on—but works off of data from this image if I actually click on points in it.

- Color Mixer shows zoom at first (and clicking on the image just zooms). If I leave the inspector and go back into it, I then get the actual color selector functionality with proper preview It does seem that if I don't unselect the previous selector (you'll see that I don't, in this first video, before moving to Color Mixer), I often will get the unwanted zoom cursor. Haven't been able to replicate this 100% of the time. But still, it seems like a bug if it goes to the zoom tool when you move to a different selector without clicking out of the first one?

- Point Color is also stuck on pixels from the other image, but like white balance, refers properly to this image if I actually click.

The preview you see on the stuck/frozen selectors are pixels from a different image that I had been working on. The selector previews had originally gotten stuck showing static pixels when working on that previous image; going back to that image and trying to use the selectors does not make a difference—they're still frozen. Sometimes, the stuck pixel previews will change to a different area of the image where they were originally frozen, for no apparent reason. But they stay stuck/frozen.

2) This second screen recording is after quitting and reopening, with the same image. Pretty much the same things happen, except I don't get Zoom the first time with Color Mixer, and the stuck inspector pixels are now from somewhere in this first image I'm working on.

I'm on Lightroom 7.1.2, MacOS 14.3, 13" M1 2020, 16GB RAM, plenty of SDD space. If it's relevant, all originals are set to sync to the computer; there's >6GB free on the cloud. Have tried both in full screen and windowed view—doesn't seem to make a difference. Have also tried emptying cache and resetting preferences to no avail.

[mod note: as I've got a bit more than just the Zoom tool issue in the current topic, not sure if this should be a separate thread, or just widen the topic of the current one?]

I am still having this issue, and have been for a long time, through Lightroom updates and everything. It really isn't a solution to have to restart Lightroom every time I try to use the white balance dropper. I've seen threads about this issue dating back over 5 years ago. Can Adobe look into this and solve it once and for all? 

I've been trying to figure out why it does this all the time, and it seems to be random...

It's not really a solution to have to restart Lightroom every time...